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From the Black Hills

Random House

Chapter One

In the spring of Mike's senior year, months before graduation, he was working long hours at Neil Schofield's cattle ranch. He was bored with school, and Josh Mitchell, his closest friend, had moved to Wyoming in February, with his father, after his parents' divorce. Josh's mother was with somebody else now.

Mike had worked at the Schofield ranch every summer since he was fourteen, and this year, in March, he began working mornings before school, getting up in the dark and riding his motorcycle--bought despite his parents' objections--out on Route 8 through the cold dawn. On those days he ate breakfast with the Schofields--with Neil, his wife, Lee-Ann, and their two-year-old daughter, Janna. Often Neil's brother, Ed, who lived in Buffalo Gap, would be there, too, having driven over in his old Corvette. He was an artist; he made pottery that he sold in Rapid City. Two other men, Arthur Strong and Louis Ivy, showed up after breakfast. They looked older than they were, and neither of them could read very well. If they got there early, they waited outside, next to their pickups.

"I can make you breakfast here," Mike's mother had offered. "I'm up early anyway." She taught high school biology and did her class preparations in the mornings before school.

"Idon't mind eating with the Schofields," Mike had told her, not saying that he preferred it to being home. The previous summer, when Mike had left home for the ranch before sunrise and not come back before nine at night, he'd said that he liked being alone on the tractor, listening to his father's old rock-and-roll tapes on his Walkman. He'd kept quiet about Neil Schofield, whose first two strikes against him, according to Mike's father, were that he was rich and hadn't had to work for it. Neil's wealthy father had bought the ranch for his retirement. Now he lived in California, and Neil ran the ranch for real, sort of. He could hire as many people as he needed and could afford having bad luck. "Money just doesn't mean that much to me," he'd told Mike.

"Let's see," Mike had said once. "If I work half an hour longer, I can afford to buy Donetta popcorn tonight at the movies." Neil had given him an extra twenty dollars with that week's pay. "I'm bullshitting you," Mike had had to explain.

Neil was fifteen years younger than Mike's father. He was tall, light-haired, and energetic, and in good shape from his work on the ranch. Mike's father, Glenn, was of average height, thin, and dark-haired, and had never been particularly happy. What Mike told himself most often was that his father had gotten lost trying to find what other people already had. Glenn didn't have the key, somehow. Mike felt that his father was always trying to figure out how he'd come into being, and how Mike had come into being, what point there was to it and how you were supposed to get through your life. Once, late one night, when Mike's mother was away, Mike had heard his father cry for almost an hour. In the morning neither of them had mentioned it. His father had never hit Mike--or anyone else, as far as Mike knew--but he got his feelings hurt too easily. And when he got angry it turned into a dark mood that lasted a long time, often weeks. "Mr. Gloom," Mike would refer to him as then, but only to himself. It would be too disloyal to use this kind of nickname, even with Josh and Donetta. Anyway, his father wasn't always like that.

Something else Mike kept quiet about with everyone were his feelings for Lee-Ann Schofield. When he first knew her, when he was fourteen, she had teased him about some things he'd mentioned to Neil, such as getting into trouble with Josh, drunk at the bowling alley, or sneaking out at three in the morning to throw eggs at somebody's window. But over the years she'd teased him less and talked to him more. She was thirteen years older than he was, thirty the year he turned seventeen. Mike was tall by then--not as tall as Neil but taller than his father, and muscular from high school wrestling and working on the ranch. He'd let his dark hair grow as long as he could before his coach objected. He looked more like his mother's side of the family: green eyes, a long face, high cheekbones.

Lee-Ann had small, pretty features. Her brown hair was unevenly cut--collar-length in back, shorter around her face. In the sunlight, Mike noticed, her hair had shades of gold and red. She wore loose clothes and no makeup and seemed to have a private way she felt about herself that was different from what other people thought they knew about her. That was what Mike liked about her. She was secretive, the way he was.

On an October morning of Mike's senior year, he went into the Schofields' house for a Coke just as Lee-Ann was coming into the kitchen after a shower. In the half second before she belted her thin robe, he saw her breasts, her stomach--a fleshiness that the girls he knew didn't have; they dieted and ran and lifted weights. Even Lee-Ann's face was softer, and seemed capable of gentler expressions. After that day, with her wet face and hair, her open robe, and the way she'd looked at him when she saw him looking at her, Mike became more sexual around her. He didn't think about the age difference anymore and hardly thought of her as married. In his mind he separated her from Neil and from his friendship with Neil.

By the time winter came, the moment he saw her was the moment he came to count on most, though he couldn't have said for what, or why. Because, as his advanced-placement English teacher would have said--she was always making them read stories about people who weren't lucky--his life was a lucky one: a nice-enough house, responsible parents, the ability to get good grades. And even that left out something: Donetta having sex with him on weekend nights at Crow Lake. Yet Mike couldn't change the way he felt about Lee-Ann Schofield; it was a fact, to him, rather than something he might question.

Instead, he fantasized about her all winter and spring. She was on his mind as he sat in class, watching snow fall on the field outside the window; as he rode his motorcycle too fast on the first warm days when the trees were budding; as he had sex with Donetta in the backseat of his mother's car. And at night in his house--his mother up late, grading papers in the dining room, his father in front of the television in the den--he lay in bed in the dark and masturbated, imagining that moment in the kitchen with Lee-Ann and picturing her robe coming off. His goal became to masturbate one day in her empty house--the emptiness sexual to him, somehow, as if his own body could fill all that space.

He didn't have the nerve or opportunity to do it until an afternoon in late May, when Lee-Ann and Janna were in town and Neil had driven over to Ed's house in Buffalo Gap. Mike had walked through the house, noticing two things he'd never noticed before: a photograph of Lee-Ann breast-feeding her daughter, and a white plaster cast of Lee-Ann's hand when she was a child, her name etched into it underneath. He walked upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Neil, with its white curtains and pale carpet. But a pair of Neil's boots were next to a chair in the corner, so Mike settled for the upstairs hallway, in sight of Lee-Ann's robe in the bathroom and the blue comforter on her bed. He leaned against the wall and unzipped his jeans, and afterward, using toilet paper to clean himself up, his legs were shaking. He wanted to do it again, almost immediately. But the house was reassuming its identity, which didn't include him. He felt like an intruder then. He went home that night without coming up to the house to say good-bye the way he usually did, and he didn't come for breakfast the next morning.

On Saturday Lee-Ann came into the barn to find him. "Are you mad at me? Did I do something I don't remember?"

"No," he told her. "It's me. I've been busy with school."

"I miss you," she said, in the sweet voice he'd heard her use only with Neil and Janna; it made tears come to his eyes. "It's all right," Lee-Ann said gently, and they put their arms around each other for the first time. She held him so closely that he had to pull back in order to kiss her. But she stepped away then, and walked out of the barn. He didn't see her again until that evening, as he was leaving. She was watching him from the front yard.

After that were days at the ranch Mike had to miss because of finals, graduation, and then, on June 18--a hot, bright Thursday afternoon--because of what his father did.

Continues...

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Excerpted from From the Black Hills by Judy Troy Copyright © 1999 by Judy Troy. Excerpted by permission.
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